Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service together with other local and international rescue teams are currently taking part in Exercise Orion – which simulates an earthquake in the fictitious local town of Widley.

Held at Fort Widley in Hampshire, the exercise takes place over 3 days and provides realistic training to the participants similar to that carried out in the Royal Navy’s DISTEX training that every ship undergoes during Basic Operational Sea Training; including limbless and other simulated casualties, public disorder, fires and realistic light and heavy rescues from buildings and bridges.

It is not clear whether the exercise will also involve establishing an emergency hospital and feeding facilities – as practiced by the Royal Navy teams when they prepare for disaster relief of tropical islands or following eathquakes and tsunami events but it is exactly the sort of realistic exercising and training that emergency planners crave but are rarely given funding for.

Of course planning for and participating in the exercise provides enormous value in itself but it is in carefully capturing and acting on the lessons identified that the real value comes. Finding out that policies, processes and equipment doesn’t work during a simulation will save lives and avoid costly procurement mistakes as well as clarifying who is best equipped and most logically responsible for tackling the myriad problems thrown up by the event.

Whilst the exercise is an encouraging development – and it is planned to carry out more over the coming years to maximise the return on investment – it would be advantageous to involve local businesses and the organizations that represent them to bring another perspective to the scenario and see how local companies can assist – for example with heavy plant and skilled staff such as abseiling window cleaners and scaffolders.

For more information and some photos of the exercise you can visit the BBC’s South Today website.

This short video taken on the 6th anniversary of the Boscastle floods shows the incredible restoration work that has taken place since the flooding and offers a short glimpse at the beautiful village of Boscastle after the terrible floods that could have cost dozens of lives were it not for the skill, readiness and teamwork of the military and civilian agencies that responded on 16 Aug 2004.

On the 16th of August 2004 Boscastle in Cornwall suffered a catastrophic flash flooding event that nearly cost the lives of 100 people. A combination of unusual weather conditions led to incredibly high, and very localised rainfalls in the vicinity of the village as the remnants of Hurricane Alex combined with sea breezes to pile up 40,000ft high clouds that lingered and poured torrential rain onto the steep sloping valleys (“flashy catchments”) and roads leading into the Boscastle valley. In Boscastle itself 112mm of rain fell in 90 minutes!

A floodwatch was issued at 1239 after the Lesnewth rain gauge recorded 3mm of rain. At 1315 a further 15mm of rain fell in 15 minutes. After several more sudden downpours and lightning induced power cuts; the River Valency began to breach it’s banks at 1530. Half an hour later a 10ft high wall of floodwater rushed through the visitor carpark at an estimate 40mph and people began to be trapped in buildings by the torrential streams of water now flowing.

At 1622 rescue helicopters from RAF Chivenor and RNAS Culdrose were scrambled and an hour later they were already winching the first of 100 people to safety from the rooftops of rapidly disintegrating buildings as local emergency services and all available military and coastguard rescue helicopters rushed to the scene.

Studying this event we can see the importance of early warning and a fast, coordinated multi-agency response.

Looking at the recovery and restoration efforts since provides us with a best practice approach to flash flood mitigation – provided you have the budget for it.

The National Budget for Civil Protection in Pakistan is reportedly £500,000 and the area flooded is the size of England. In UK we’ve spent more than 10 times that amount on a small village…

I’ve been talking to a lot of people over the last couple of days about the importance of “horizon scanning” – that is, monitoring the emerging opportunities and threats that could impact upon your business – using the internet and other means.

The emergence of mobile banking is a good example. Whilst it hasn’t yet taken off to a large degree in the uk, it is becoming easier to use your mobile phone for a variety of transactions such as paying to park, booking tickets online and so forth.

Meanwhile in Africa, mobile banking is booming because users feel it’s safer to have their money held in the cloud than to carry it with them. What might this mean for the banking sector and indeed businesses that don’t make it easy for customers to pay via mobile phone?

Although the transaction size is modest by Western standards, the volume is increasing and the overheads of operating the system are small. Added to that it’s very convenient – provided that the network is up and the phone has a charge!

Mobile banking has also been used to good effect in Haiti following the eathquakes that have damaged a lot of the traditional infrastructure – so should we look at mobile banking as a standard recovery option for areas affected by devastating natural disasters?

It would seem relatively straightforward to issue cheap, pay as you go, telephones to victims of disasters and broadband can be beamed in a spotlight fashion to areas that lack a traditional mobile mast network – I believe M12 solutions based in Fareham have provided broadband this way in southern Ireland?

So that just leaves a bit of straightforward setting up that can be done when the phone is issued via a node that is able to connect to the clients bank in order to transfer credit to the phone – of course if the customer has cash with them, that could be taken at point of issue.

But what about charging? If the electricity supply is unavailable we’d need to provide charging hubs (maybe an opportunity for Costa and Starbucks!) or perhaps solar charging capabilities.

I know that Twitter@Documentally has experimented with a variety of solar charging capabilities in the UK and I’m certain that companies are exploring how to improve these and increase their portability and resilience.

Hmm, might be worth looking into this a bit more…